a moment of clarity

Priest MoP

The preliminary peek at skills and talents for MoP have been revealed. And I just had to get this out before the weekend. (Happy Turkey Day tomorrow!)

Of course, I looked at the mage stuff first.

Polymorph turkey?!?!?!

That might, just might, break my code of being a polymorph sheep purist. Maybe. I think it will amuse me.

For the most part, the mage stuff didn’t strike me as odd. There are a couple OICWUTUDIDTHAR points, but for the most part nothing struck me as weird or crazy. Maybe I’m not looking close enough. Not quite sure how Arcane Missiles will work, but I probably just need to look closer and I’ll beat the mage portion of this topic to death another day. I think I may be holding out to pay more attention after the devs have been yelled at for doing it wrong and have had a chance to tighten up the design a bit.

Now the priesty stuff… there were some items that caught my eye. (You can check out the priest trees here.)

If you’re not familiar with the new model going forward in Mists of Panderia (anyone else keep wanting to spell it as Mysts?), is that you get certain things just for being your class. These are basic abilities that, when offered low enough in the talents trees of today, everyone took. Then you get spiffy stuff based on your spec selection. And then you get a talent choice every 15 levels. These are more utility-oriented and are not supposed to have a significant impact on output. These are the things you take because they look cool and fit your playstyle.

Yes, there will be optimal talent selections for different encounters, but they’ve mentioned that we should be able to shift talents as easily as we shift glyphs today.

There’s a lot of babble about the talents, but not too many people are paying attention to the core skills.

So let’s start with what we get as a leveling disc priest:

Level 1

Weapon skills for daggers, 1-H maces, staves, and wands (remember that they are doing away with the shoot/relic slot and wands are becoming a mainhand weapon)

Level 3

SW: Pain – DoT

Level 5

PW: Shield – Absorption

Level 7

Flash Heal – WTF? Priests can’t heal until level 7? With the way the “cradle” (starting areas) have been nerfed to the ground, this actually makes sense. No sooner than you leave combat, you’re back up to full anyways. If it doesn’t kill you, you’ll be fine by the time you pick a fight with the next neutral mob.

Level 9

Inner Fire – Self buff to increase armor and spell power

Level 10

Disc: Penance – I heal you in the face!

Level 15

Join the Dungeon Finder!

Pick a talent! (Crowd control stuff)

Level 18

Resurrection – Hold the fucking phone. So I can join a dungeon at level 15 but I can’t res a fallen party member until level 18? Please tell me this is an oversight and will be corrected.

Disc: Holy Fire – Damage with a DoT

Level 22

PW: Fortitude – Stamina buff

Level 26

Dispel Magic – Removes 2 harmful spells from yourself or 1 beneficial spell from an enemy. I believe there is a passive when you select Holy or Disc that allows you to dispel other friendly targets.

Level 30

Talent – Movement speed stuff

Level 32

SW: Death – Damage spell that just might kill you if you’re not careful.

Disc: Rapture – Passive mana regen when your bubble is popped.

Level 34

Levitate – Yay!

Disc: Greater Heal – The bomb heal to use when Penance is on cooldown. At this point you only have 3 heals and I doubt Flash Heal will ever be mana efficient.

Level 36

Disc: Inner Focus – Reduces mana cost and increases crit chance of Flash Heal, Greater Heal, and Prayer of Healing. I’m sorry. I must have missed something. WHERE THE FUCK IS MY PRAYER OF HEALING?

Level 38

Mind Control – No Mind Soothe to go with this. But that’s OK, no one has used it since Instructor Razuvious anyway. (OK, every now and again you find someone that will play with it, but since it’s so rare, the rest of the party flips out and can’t cope.)

Level 42

Mind Vision – 50,000 yard range. Whoopdedo.

Level 44

Disc: Evangelism – Passive ability to get stacks of Evangelism that reduces mana cost of Smite, Holy Fire, and Penance. (Of course, you can’t spend those stacks until level 45, and then only if you pick up the Archangel talent, which has lost its mana return component. Booo. And it’s competing with the Healing Boomerang. Guess which I’m picking? Wings or another I HEAL YOU IN THE FACE!)

Level 45

Talent, go! Healing tweaks

Disc: Grace – Passive ability to increase the healing to a target after receiving heals from your Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Spirit Shell, and Penance. Spirit Shell? What is this? I am intrigued.

Level 50

Mysticism – Passive 5% Intellect boost. With the proposed change to Int no longer increasing mana pool size, I wonder if this will eventually also incorporate some sort of mana regen or increase to Spirit.

Level 58

Disc: Pain Suppression – Don’t taze me bro! (OK, so that might not be totally appropriate for the description, but I wanted to say it anyway.)

Level 80

Level 84

Leap of Faith – Lifegrip!

Level 90

Most interesting talent tier of them all. Each one has different applications and will probably get swapped around a bit depending on the fight. Also, how many times will we kill our tanks with Void Shift? On accident of course! *wink*

Wow.

So what are we missing, ability-wise?

Renew. OK, as a disc priest, I don’t use it very often. As a leveling ability though, it can be crazy powerful. And if you know you’re going to be out of range of your heal target for a bit (or be silenced or otherwise incapacitated) this little baby does come in handy.

Heal. No big deal. I hated having Heal on my bars and never touched it. When I had a set bonus that used it I cried bitterly and still refused to cast it.

Binding Heal. BIG deal. I use this puppy all the time.

Divine Hymn. OK, I don’t use it as often as I should, but it still comes in handy.

Prayer of Healing. I think this one may show up when you select your spec as either Holy or Disc. It’s not listed in either spell list and it’s not found on the talent trees, but I have a skill that mentions it. If PoH somehow gets removed from disc, we will have NO group healing capability. (Prayer of Mending doesn’t count.)

Divine Aegis. A core part of the absorb mechanic and it’s gone. Hopefully baked in.

Shackle Undead. Perhaps replaced by the Void Tendrils talent. Since using it always goes roughly like, “OK, priest shackle star, and OMG what is the ret pally doing?!!?” “NOMNOMNOM I KILL ALL UNDEAD! PEWPEWPEW” I probably won’t miss it much.

Fear Ward. Very situational, but not having it when you need it sucks.

Shadow Protection. Were protection auras also removed from pallies? This seems a bit odd to take away.

And the big one for me, WHERE IN THE HELL IS MY ATONEMENT!!!1!!!111 I’m hoping this gets baked directly into selecting discipline as my talent spec. There is the talent in the level 90 bracket, Vampiric Dominance, But I think that’s more of an extension for Vampiric Touch. Not to mention, if it’s only available at level 90, that would destroy the fun of disc leveling with Atonement. If they took away atonement because they want to incorporate something similar with the new monk class I shall be quite vexed.

Well that’s a bummer. I guess they are doing it to even further remove the things that make us special snowflakes so we are one step closer to bringing a 25-man druid raid without sacrificing any utility.

Seems like a pretty big mechanic to leave to a glyph. It’s the sort of thing I’d have expected to see as a talent, actually, but it probably wouldn’t fit in the thematic framework that they’re trying to build here. Vampiric dominance isn’t nearly good enough to replace Atonement.

Given that there’s a talent that specifically modifies Fade – and only Fade – I’m guessing its exclusion was an oversight.

Just FYI, Blizzard has already said there are several spells they neglected to add to these trees but that will still be around in MoP, and I’m pretty sure I saw prayer of healing on that list.

I’m pretty happy with the talent trees so far, especially mage and warlock. Rogue is kinda sucky, but there’s time for them to fix it. I still don’t like the idea of waiting until level 90 for the coolest toys, though.